It’s been quite a few years since Werner Herzog did a major fictive film. The last couple of decades has seen an increasing veer into documentaries and more experimental cinema. However, with the 2007 film, Rescue Dawn, Herzog shows that the years have not taken their all too inexorable toll on the visionary mind. While the film is not an inarguably great masterpiece along the lines of some of his classic fictive films from the 1970s, it is a terrific war film, but, more so, a terrific prison escape and action film, even as it wholly subverts many of those subgenre’s worst banalities.

The film is sometimes an expansion, condensation, and retelling of the same basic tale Herzog told in his classic 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly. That film chronicled the life and capture, over Laos, of a German-born U.S. Navy pilot named Dieter Dengler, who spent six months as a prisoner of war in Laos, before escaping with six other men into the jungle. Only Dengler was known to have survived.

Rescue Dawn details and condenses many aspects of the earlier film, and is well acted by a stellar cast, well directed by Herzog, and brilliantly cinematographed by Peter Zeitlinger, who melds the stunning visuals of Thailand with Herzog’s own classic ‘eye level realism’ to evoke some of the same sorts of jungle imagery that made films like Aguirre: The Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo so impressive. On top of that is the wonderful film scoring by Klaus Bedelt, which is very minimal yet effective when employed, mixing the high and low forms of music Herzog is known for.

The plot is rather simple, and greatly condenses the tale the real Dengler tells within the earlier film. Dengler (Christian Bale) is shot down over Laos in 1965, while on a bombing run that is being hushed up by the military brass. He survives the crash, is captured by local guerillas, then brought to a local official’s headquarters where he is promised early release if he signs a propaganda statement condemning the U.S. bombing of Indochina. Dengler, who loves America as the nation that helped him learn to fly, refuses, and is put through a gauntlet of tortures, before being turned over to a POW camp supported by the Vietcong.

There he meets other military and civilian, American and other, prisoners. He becomes friendly with one, Duane Martin (Steve Zahn), and antagonistic with another, Gene DeBruin (Jeremy Davies), who looks like an anorexic pre-Charles Manson. DeBruin says he will foil the escape plan by letting guards know of it, because he feels their release is imminent (even though he has been held over two years), until one of the Indochinese prisoners tells the group he overheard the Pathet Lao guards planning to execute them all so they could return to their villages for food. They had waited several months for the rainy season to plot an escape. Dengler had found ways to let them be free of their shackles at night and spy on the guards, whom they nicknamed Little Hitler and Crazy Horse, among others.